The Climate x Super Bowl Stocktake 2024
The traditional school of thought is that Super Bowl advertisements reveal the most important (and expensive) branding and strategic objectives of companies. Do brands need to focus on shoring up market share for their core products? Launching new ones?
Shifting their business to more sustainable products and systems?
The first analysis in this series, cheekily titled “Give Me Greenwashing Over This,” made clear that sustainability and climate-related messaging was largely absent in 2023. In 2024, advertisers were even less adventurous than 2023 and climate messaging was rarer, despite increasing climate and sustainability commitments from those corporations, as reported by The Science Based Targets Initiative. Though the virtues of greenwashing are widely litigated today, the absence of communications around commitments may put climate and sustainability targets at greater risk.
Key Findings Explored In-Depth Below:
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NFL Climate PR Takes the Day Off: The NFL made no mention of sustainability efforts, even when programming was climate-related; only 22% of stadiums have voluntarily committed to LEED certification standards.
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Advertisers Make Climate Commitments; Advertisements Miss the Memo: Fifty-three percent of corporations that advertised in 2024 have credible science-based targets for their organizations (14% are Net-Zero), an uptick from 2023, but their ads were business-as-usual.
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EVs Promote Price, Not Opulence (bye bye, Hummer EV): The average price of advertised vehicles dropped from ~$69,000 to ~$50,700 from 2023 to 2024, while the MPGe for Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) and Plug-In Hybrid Vehicles (PHEVs) jumped from 74 MPGe to 94 MPGe.
NFL’s Allergy to Clean Energy & Climate Promotion
Figure 1: Dot chart shows comparing LEED Certification points for NFL stadiums engaged with that process over time.
Allegiant Stadium was the first Super Bowl host to power the event with “100% renewable energy.” An impressive feat, no doubt: through a power purchase agreement with NV energy, the stadium was indirectly powered by approximately 28 megawatt-hours (MWh) via a large solar plant developed by EDF Renewables. The NFL, usually a public relations machine, made no mention of this initiative during the broadcast.
For context, of the 30 stadiums in the NFL, only seven are LEED-certified and fewer (e.g. SoFi Stadium) have made non-verifiable claims or just begun the certification process (Figure 1). Stadiums continue to improve their sustainability via new builds and recertifications measured by U.S. Green Building Council, but there is currently no mandate made by the NFL to meet emissions reduction goals on-premise. In its place, the NFL has committed to waste management revisions and buying renewable energy credits to offset the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl only.
The only programming from the NFL that alluded to the growing impacts of climate change was naming the Lahainaluna Lunas football team from Maui (the site of the worst “natural” disaster in the history of Hawaiʻi) honorary captains of the game. They again made no mention of the causes of the massive wildfire, which include harsher climate effects and exploitation of the island's land.
Super Bowl Advertisers Mobilize to Address Climate Behind Closed Doors
The NFL sold ad slots to corporations that have science-based targets at a higher rate in 2024 than 2023. Science-based targets refer to practices that organizations use to reduce emissions substantially enough to avoid the worst effects of climate change (those proposals are deemed “valid” by the Science-Based Targets Initiative). This should be a relatively consistent trend in the future as well: in 2023 alone, roughly 2,000 companies established targets, marking a 114% growth year-over-year. Fifty-three percent of advertisers have some sort of valid target, with 14% of advertisers having net-zero targets (Figure 2). Including corporations with commitments (intentions to set a verifiable science-based target), 67% of corporations that advertised during the super bowl have some form of pledge.
For comparison, 66% of the Fortune Global 500 companies have commitments, as reported by Climate Impact Partners, roughly the same ratio. As it stands, mobilizing the capital and organization needed to reduce emissions may benefit larger and more profitable corporations’ ability to do so. Climate Impact Partners reported that the average profit of companies that reduced emissions year over year was $6.7 Billion, whereas “climate bystanders” pulled in profit figures closer to $5.8 Billion on average. But the aggregate impact is still negative. Climate Impact Partners reported that despite a majority of companies making commitments, the average increase in operational emissions still increased 1.5%.
Figure 2: Stacked bar chart comparing total counts of commitments, net-zero targets, and other types of targets year-over-year, and count of advertisers and their commitments.
“Greenwashing” Turns to “Greenhushing”
A subset of advertisers that bought ad spots in both 2023 and 2024 advanced commitments between the two events; some had clearer strategies than others. In its press release to commit to a net-zero target, Uber states that by 2030, they hope to see 50% of kilometers driven in key European cities using EVs and 80% of restaurant orders with Uber Eats across European and Asia Pacific cities transition from single-use plastics to reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging options. The company committed to these targets in April 2023 but have not mentioned progress in earnings calls since.
That appears to be the case for most companies with net-zero targets. Of publicly-traded companies that have committed to net zero targets, only two of the six have made any public comments about their sustainability efforts in earnings calls. Intuit (TurboTax) announced the first set of winners for their Coalfield Solar Fund (grants to incentivize solar energy projects in coal mining communities), and T-Mobile stated that they were “proud to be the first U.S. wireless provider to commit to achieving net zero emissions across (their) entire carbon footprint by 2040 using SBTi's net-zero standard.” Nat Bullard cited South Pole data in his annual Decarbonization deck (slide 82) that summarizes this dynamic well: 58% of companies that responded are finding climate communications more difficult and are decreasing their external communications; 70% of companies in the survey admit to “greenhushing."
Figure 3: Ladder chart identifying change in commitments between 2023 and 2024 for corporations that advertised in both years. Also corporations with new targets in the last year.
Commitments or Climate-Friendly(ier) Products Absent from Ads
The share of advertisements that highlighted environmentally-friendly/friendlier products shrunk from 8% to 5% year-over- year (Figure 4). Super Bowl viewers instead saw business-as-usual promotions, with 86% of eligible advertisements promoting core business lines with 55% of those advertisements featuring celebrities.
Gartner research stated in 2023 that “environmental sustainability” breached the top 10 priorities for CEOs for the first time in the survey’s history, rising “25% over the previous year’s survey.” They estimate that by 2026, environmental sustainability could be a higher CEO strategic business priority “than the technology-related category.” In the height of the 2022-2023 inflationary environment, 73% of advertisements focused on core products, and the share of advertisements focusing on core products jumped 13% in 2024, suggesting that the “focus on core competencies” paradigm in boardrooms across the country is still in full swing.
Figure 4: Dual bar chart showing year over year changes in advertisement types between the 2023 and 2024 super bowls.
The Climate x Consumer Category is EVs; Focus Changes to Cost
Despite an onslaught of negative press suggesting that the EV market was stagnating, the market fared well in 2023, as Jesse Jenkins reported. 2023 was the year of large EV model launches: pickup truck EVs, Hummer EVs, and of course the Cybertruck. EV advertisements in 2023 largely represented that trend, featuring the Ram 1500 REV ad with the tagline “Premature Electrification” and Will Ferrell traversing zombie landscapes in a GMC Sierra EV Denali. The consumer perception problem that EV advertisers hoped to address in 2023 was reliability and battery storage.
But recent research from S&P Global suggests that the biggest consumer barrier is pricing. In 2024, EV advertisers addressed that concern more than they did in 2023, intentionally or not. In 2024, the average MSRP of all cars advertised was $50,000 and the EVs subset was $59,000, a $10,000 reduction in the average price for advertised EVs during the 2023 Super Bowl (Figure 5). The average MPGe across advertised EVs in 2024 was 94 MPGe, up from 74 MPGe in 2023. The average transaction price for all light-duty EVs hovers around $50,000, a significant price decline from years past but still thousands of dollars above the industry average.
Advertisers returned to internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle promotions too. Toyota and Hyundai promoted large ICE vehicles, much lower in price than EV counterparts but significantly more energy-thirsty. Recent research from Vox suggests that if short-term cost and repairability concerns about EVs persist, climate advocates should consider a regression to plug-in hybrids as a second-best option. These vehicles, represented in 2023 but not 2024 ads, can run as EVs for 80% of daily car trips (less than 10 miles), while also potentially benefiting from EV subsidies and building the charging station market.
Figure 5: Dot chart comparing the estimated MPG/MPGe with MSRP for all vehicles promoted in 2023 and 2024.
Spotlight: Kia’s Promotion of Bidirectional Charging
Only one advertisement fully imagined what an EV future - and an economy built around distributed energy resources - could be. Kia’s EV9 advertisement boasted its bidirectional charging capabilities, which allows EV owners to send energy back out to the grid, much like it receives it. Ideally, EVs would operate similar to at-home batteries, supplying load to a house when needed or sending energy back to the grid when demand (and therefore prices) for that energy is high. In critical circumstances like blackouts or natural disasters, bidirectional charging also allows owners to power life-saving equipment.
In the video, the KIA EV9 is used to power a series of outdoor lighting systems by simply plugging them into the car. This type of functionality, despite seeming marginal, is only available in cars made by five of the top 20 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) globally. Tesla has promised to have the capability in all vehicles by model year 2025, and GM has committed to the same by model year 2026, and companies like Fermata Energy are working to enable the “V2E” (“vehicle to everything”) transition.
Figure 6: Screenshot of Kia EV9 Super Bowl advertisement boasting bidirectional charging capabilities
Overview Note: CBS Self-Promotes, Just Like Fox
For a second year in a row, the host network owned a staggering 49% of advertisement slots, promoting most in partnership with Paramount+. Overall, the spread of categories represented in advertisements was eerily similar to 2023, dominated by Communication Services ads (primarily movies, shows, and streaming) accounting for 39% of spots, and followed by Consumer Discretionary (24%) and Consumer Staples ads (20%). Interestingly, Social and Political programming (bucketed in “Other”) was more prominent: “He Gets Us” ads and The Dawn Project ads were present in both 2023 and 2024, but political ads were more prominent in 2024.
Figure 7: Multiple pie charts showing share of ads based on GICS categories across 2023 and 2024, and the share of Communication Services ads owned by Super Bowl hosts.